⚔️ 2023's social platform battle royale
How did we get here, and what's actually changing?
Welcome to the first issue of Sidebars. A meaningful handful of you subscribed to this without even knowing what I’d send to your inbox, so first: Thank you for that. I hope you stick along for the ride.
Are we in a social media centrifuge?
Let me be upfront that I’m not writing this to rail against X (now Twitter). What’s been most interesting to me on that platform in 2023 has been how similar its path has been to Facebook (pre-Meta) about a decade ago when the company began tightening up organic reach in newsfeeds to incentivize paid view boosts. Online media has a rich history of publishers growing too dependent on single platforms for reach, be it in Google results, on Facebook, or on LinkedIn. Organic reach is a beautiful thing, but it’s always going to be at the mercy of the algorithms and business goals of the platforms where it occurs.
And you know what? At the beginning of 2023, Facebook still had more users than any of its competitors, with Meta platforms occupying three more of the top 10 slots globally.
In the intervening months, 2023 has seen something of a super bloom in new social networks. I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers what it was like in 2011 and 2012 choosing which share buttons to bake into your site. Google+ was still emergent, and sites including Digg, Reddit, Path, Pinterest, and others piled up pretty quickly to create absurdly large bouquets of icons at the bottoms of blog posts if you wanted to maximize user options. This year we have a host of new and emboldened contenders:
Bluesky: Good for some fun conversations and commentary (from many users who first made it big on Twitter), though it’s also contending with racist content and moderation challenges
Threads: High-volume all-around blend of info and familiar faces, with a heavy extra dose of Instagram influencers
Post: Compelling premise, though Artifact is doing a lot of it with a more robust experience
Hive: Seemed to have some momentum early on as a visual/meme-heavy feed
Mastodon: Which isn’t new but gained waves of users in the past year
Personally, I’m actively using at least two of them, with accounts in various states of affairs on each. That’s mainly at the expense of my time on the app formerly known as Twitter, which for the past decade has been most valuable to me as a news discovery and source engagement tool.
Meta’s newest entrant, Threads, roped in 100 million users this summer. However, stickiness may not be there yet, judging from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments indicating that his company is still struggling to retain at least half of them. If his team figures that out, though, they could be on the way to claiming five of the top 10 slots above — not just four. In that scenario, Meta would just be capturing one more segment of social media users who have been spending time outside of its ecosystem.
For that ascendant Threads future to happen, though, it’s going to need to evolve, perhaps through desktop experience and/or becoming a destination for breaking news on par with what Twitter achieved.
An alternative may be that we see an increasingly fractured and diversified set of platforms, with news discovery tools like Artifact, Apple News, and perhaps Post growing in one direction, with Bluesky, Threads, and even X splitting up social users. And it’s worth noting — as seen in the chart from the beginning — that Twitter was always a relatively niche platform (albeit one that its current owner believes can grow into an all-purpose super app.
But that’s a whole other conversation.
Side work
“What we know 3 years into the great remote work experiment,” a follow-up to a Medium post I wrote back in 2020
“Diesel Springs Science Fair,” a synthetic look at non-existent science projects from some steampunk teens in a fictional Ozarks town
Scenes from the Mist Trail at Yosemite National Park, which I drove into at the crack of dawn last Friday
Recent side reads and watches
“Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s latest film, which isn’t my favorite Wes Anderson film (or even in my top five), but it was filled with brilliant performances and extremely fun set design
“Fall of X” No. 1, which bookends an extraordinary (if in some cases predictably iterative) era of Krakoa-island utopia for the X-Men comics
“The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck,” which I didn’t walk away from with a lot of actionable life-changing insights but was entertained by appreciated for the perspective on relationships